2016 Postmortem
In reply to the discussion: Forget Sanders and Clinton for a moment. This is a symbolic schism that has been long brewing [View all]cascadiance
(19,537 posts)... that Hillary and Obama were avoiding then. But as I have noted here before, part of me wonders that at the time most of us didn't know of his personal issues, if he wasn't being schooled to talk about these issues to help draw our support to him, where many of us might have supported Kucinich having a bigger voice and staying in the primaries longer to keep the conversation on progressive topics than the later avoidance of such when it was just down to Hillary and Obama. I still strongly feel that we perhaps were being manipulated in to supporting a "more realistic choice" of Edwards at the time, who was looked on as more apt to compete for the nomination then than Kucinich before the other issues came out.
Even if Kucinich hadn't won, and he likely wouldn't have, if we had the opportunity to give him more support so that he could be a bigger voice later in the campaign, we could have had more promises from both Hillary and Obama that Obama might have otherwise had to follow through on, or we could have had more room to criticize him for breaking them on things like Free Trade crap that he's pushing on us now.